START

Conservative foreign policy wonks are worried that the Democratic majority in the Senate might try to squeeze through the new START agreement before the influx of new Republican senators come to work in January. But Don Stewart, spokesman for Republican leader Senator Mitch McConnell, thinks that the Democrats probably will not be able to get new START through during the lame duck session, and almost certainly not before Senator-elect Mark Kirk is sworn, which will happen probably around Thanksgiving.

The president has endorsed the treaty, but Senate Republicans aren't ready to ratify it.

Ratification of the new nuclear arms treaty with the Russians may not be as easy as the White House, Senate Democrats, and the media appear to expect. The pact, called the New START agreement, faces early trouble in the Senate – serious trouble.

With healthcare reform behind him, President Obama has turned his attention to what is perhaps his number one foreign policy priority: nuclear disarmament. On April 6, the Obama administration released a new Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) report, outlining U.S. nuclear weapons strategy. The NPR is not the dramatic document that some on the left had hoped for, but in a sop to Obama's base, does revise U.S. declaratory policy to limit the instances in which the United States will use nuclear weapons. The NPR also fails to outline a clear path to warhead modernization, something that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said is essential to ensuring the reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the coming decades.

...this treaty is dead.

A friendly reality check for exuberant Democrats on the first day of the Nuclear-Zero Pax Obama -- this treaty is almost certainly dead on arrival. I hedge only because the Democrats might try to jam it through using reconciliation. (Is it legal? The parliamentarian will decide!) Yes, Republican criticism has been relatively muted. The treaty is a give-away to Moscow, but it isn’t a total capitulation -- the cuts are marginal and the effect will largely be to continue the status quo, i.e. a decaying U.S. nuclear deterrent and rampant proliferation. We already knew that reversing those trends isn’t a top priority for the Obama administration (excepting Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who seems to have put up a real fight on this one).

Disarmament for us, proliferation for them.

On March 26, President Obama announced that the United States had reached a new strategic arms agreement with Russia. He explained that the new nuclear-arms treaty strengthens “our global efforts to stop the spread of these weapons, and to ensure that other nations meet their own responsibilities.”

The timing of the Russian-American agreement, and Obama’s urgency in signing it next week in Prague, is directly linked to these global efforts. For come this May, nuclear non-proliferation will be the subject of a major international conference—a review of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—at which the new treaty will be held up for all to emulate.

How will START finish?

The Moscow Treaty signed by George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin in 2002 did not require the actual destruction of a single U.S. or Russian warhead. All that it mandated was that warheads be taken from operational status—say, sitting on the tip of an ICBM—and moved to storage. Although the treaty was ratified by the Senate by a vote of 95 to 0, along the way Senate Democrats unrelentingly slammed the Bush administration for this deficiency.

Has President Obama ended a second cold war? A cascade of news stories and editorials are creating the impression that his newly concluded START agreement with Moscow heralds a breakthrough in an intensifying standoff between Russia and the United States. "The new treaty represents perhaps the most concrete foreign policy achievement for Mr. Obama since he took office 14 months ago," gushes the New York Times. The Washington Post, for its part, hails the treaty as "the most extensive nuclear arms-control agreement in nearly two decades”; it represents “President Obama's first victory in his ambitious agenda to move toward a nuclear-free world."